BRIDGING

CURRENT

The five national surveys and interviews among actors of participatory culture and co-creative activities have been completed. The thereby collected data was analyzed by EDUCULT and merged into a joint report. The results will be discussed with the partners at the second partner meeting in April in Bielsko-Biala/Poland.

BRIDGING

Bridging Social Capital by Participatory and Co-Creative Culture

The European sector of participatory culture (defined as amateur arts, voluntary culture and heritage) is, next to amateur sport, the largest civil society sector in EU member states, and it has been the fastest growing civil society area in terms of members and new associations in the last years.

The aim is to bridge social capital and to promote inclusion by strengthening co-creative culture activities in this sector. Thereby, the projects intend to strengthen co-creation activities which change the learning context not only from individual creativity to collective creativity, but involve different subgroups of individuals into the activities in order to bridge people who are generally outside of each other’s direct social networks. The work will focus on bridging social capital in the following five contexts of culture activities: inter-social, inter-generational, inter-regional, inter-cultural, and inter-European.

On the short term level, the goals of the project are to educate, teach and engage the key staff in the huge European lifelong learning sector of participatory arts and culture and to initiate new co-creative culture activities with high potential of bridging social capital. In the long term, the project aims to help to increase the mutual trust between different social groups participating in the activities. We hope that by providing information and raising awareness, the project will inspire the learning providers in the sector to be more societal engaged in order to counter the current decline of cultural cohesion and mutual trust in our communities and to promote openness and inclusive participation among formerly segregated social groups.

Method

The 2-year project has four main phases:

Launching of a Communication Portal, English and completion of a state of the art-survey in four participating project countries.

Compiling good practice and innovative approaches and publish five thematic compendia reports.

Design and test curricula in seven national pilot courses in all of the seven partner countries

Complete seven national conferences on the issue, including the final dissemination and publication of the project summary report.

Legal note: This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.